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A decade after a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, the war is already forgotten in the West

Dressed in chemical weapons suits, Lance Cpl. Mark Cattabay (left) stands beside Postmedia's Matthew Fisher during an early pause in the race for Baghdad during the 2003 Iraq invasion to oust Saddam Hussein from power. The Marines of 3rd LAR had a reunion to mark 10 years since the war last weekend in Las Vegas.Photo: Matthew Fisher/Postmedia

The names of towns where the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” fought important battles in a war that began 10 years ago this week have already faded from western memory just as George Bush, who ordered the invasion of Iraq, has faded from public view.

The crack U.S. Marines I was embedded with were surprised and delighted by the rapturous welcome that Iraqis gave them in 2003 as they celebrated finally being free of Saddam Hussein.

The first time I heard that the U.S. war plan for Iraq might be in peril was actually before the initial ground invasion was over. On the outskirts of Baghdad a few hours before Saddam’s statue was toppled in Fardus Square, a tobacco-chewing U.S. commander with a southern drawl told me, “Winning the war was easy. Winning the peace is going to be the hard part.”

The officer wondered whether the U.S. had nearly enough troops to keep the Sunnis and Shias from murdering each other. His doubts about whether the State Department had a plan to run the government or provide essential services such as electricity and water also proved to be prophetic.

A problem that was already evident at an early stage in the U.S.’s ill-starred occupation was that in its haste to reach the capital, Washington ordered its troops to ignore huge weapons caches that they kept discovering. Beginning in 2004 I would awaken almost every morning in Baghdad to the sound and tremor of explosions from improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers wearing explosive vests fueled by pieces of rockets, mortars and artillery shells from of all those untouched armouries. Such attacks and the outrages perpetrated by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison that became public knowledge that same year caused support for the coalition’s presence in Iraq to collapse, opening the door for al-Qaida to join the war.

More than 112,000 Iraqis have died violently according to estimates by the human rights organization, Iraq Body Count, most of them in attacks that Shias and Sunnis have made on each other. Nearly 5,000 coalition troops were killed. To finance the war and the occupation is said to have cost Washington upwards of $1 trillion.

I supported the invasion, not because as the Bush administration falsely or mistakenly claimed, Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or the equally dubious claim that Saddam had ties to al-Qaida. I thought that to rid Iraq and the region of such a tyrannical thug was the right thing to do.

I contacted Iraqi friends last week to ask them what they now made of the war. The consensus was that despite all the death and suffering it had been worth it because Saddam had been defeated and hanged. But they made clear that they thought the coalition made serious mistakes after the invasion that gave al-Qaida of Mesopotamia opportunities and exacerbated the deep sectarian divide that have long existed between Shias and Sunnis and between Arabs and Kurds and Turkmen. But Saddam, much like Tito in the Balkans, used violence and the threat of violence to suppress sectarian and ethnic passions for a while.

A surge in U.S. forces in 2007 engineered by Gen. David Petraeus, and a generously funded initiative to support the Sunni Awakening after the Sunni tribes had become tired of al-Qaida’s religious fervour, saved the U.S. from a humiliating defeat and eventually provided the space that President Barack Obama used to get the troops out.

Like the former Yugoslavia in the ’90s, Iraq appears to be disintegrating today. Ignoring the Shias who now run Iraq, Kurds in the north of the country are trying to make an unexpected peace with Turkey. Shias and Sunnis in the capital live on a knife edge. To try to avoid mayhem, they have barricaded themselves behind forests of the hideous concrete barriers that are one of the few enduring American legacies in Iraq.

With coalition forces no longer around to protect them, some Sunnis are once again turning to al-Qaida to defend them and to try to reclaim some of the country’s immense oil wealth that is beginning to flow to the Kurds and especially to the Shias.

It is not possible to guess the eventual outcome of the mess that is Iraq. The clear winner for the moment is Iran, which loathes the West, because its Shia cousins now dominate the government while the Sunnis, who fared better under their kinsman Saddam than the Shias did, are back on their heels.

But frankly, who in the West cares any more? After all the blood and treasure expended by the U.S.-led coalition, Iraq’s future is of little interest to those who poked this viper’s nest 10 years ago. They have chosen to forget it ever happened.

Matthew Fisher is Postmedia's international affairs columnist and Canada's longest serving foreign correspondent. He has lived and worked abroad for 31 years in Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and... read more, more recently, Afghanistan. His assignments have taken him to 162 countries, all U.S. states, Canadian provinces and territories, above the North Pole and to an iceberg over the Magnetic North Pole. During his travels he has been an eyewitness to 19 wars and conflicts. The personal highlight of his career as a roaming correspondent was when he attended Nelson Mandela's inauguration in Pretoria.View author's profile